JOHN UPDIKE

Novelist, Essayist, Poet Critic
Benaroya Hall, 7:30 pm
Wednesday, November 12, 2008

Underwritten by Teutsch Partners, LLC

Biography
Excerpt
Selected Works
Links

Biography

John Updike
Sex, art and religion, Updike famously declared in an autobiographical essay, remain the three secrets of the human experience. With bold language and imagination he has explored them all in his writing, which includes more than sixty books of poetry, criticism, essay, and prose. He is known in his essays and criticism for his sharp eye and unflinching opinion; for unambiguous lines; and for reviews that actually review, not just summarize. In his fiction he has been bold, exposing the inner workings of middle class life in a way that cracked the careful veneer of a certain kind of America.

The Los Angeles Times called Updike “an…imposing stance on the literary landscape,” as he's earned “virtually every American literary award, repeated bestsellerdom and the near-royal status of the American author-celebrity." His accolades include the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, the National Medal for the Humanities, and two Pulitzer Prizes: in 1982 for Rabbit is Rich and in 1990 for Rabbit at Rest.

Perhaps his most famous works, the four Rabbit novels star Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a twenty-six year old former high school basketball star in the shadow of his glory days. Updike was twenty-seven when he began writing Rabbit Run with a soft pencil. At the time, he says in the introduction to the four-volume set, published in 1995, that he had “no thought of a sequel.” He wrote furiously in the present tense for nine months, typed the draft and sent it off to Knopf and, after a few weeks, heard it had been well received. Every ten years for the next three decades, he produced another novel in the series.

“The religious faith that a useful truth will be imprinted by a perfect artistic submission underlies these Rabbit novels,” he later wrote. Indeed, with these books and the work between and after, Updike has pushed against and into America’s Puritan sensibilities, his own Lutheran upbringing, and the current events of his time. With each addition to the series, Rabbit, Updike, and America grew up together.

Born in 1932 in Reading and raised in Shillington, Pennsylvania, Updike was the only child of middle class parents—his father a high school teacher, his mother a writer. He earned his B.A. in English from Harvard University in 1954, the same year he met and married his first wife, Mary E. Pennington, and sold a poem and a short story to The New Yorker. The following year, the Updikes traveled to England where he studied at Oxford and met Katherine and E.B. White. The Whites encouraged Updike to take a job at The New Yorker upon his return to the States, which he did, beginning his career-long relationship with the magazine. Two years later, he moved with his wife and newborn son to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where he sat down to write Rabbit Run. After another two children, Updike divorced in 1974, moved to Boston, and took a position at Boston University. He married Martha Ruggles Bernhard three years later and settled with her and her three children in Massachusetts, where the couple still resides.

Excerpt
From The Widows of Eastwick (2008)
“How quickly, Alexandra thought, they had slipped back into being a trio, a trinity coming together to form a cone of power. It was not that she liked the other two women better than her leathery, bohemian, long-haired, jeans-clad female friends in Taos—comparatively, Sukie and Jane had narrow, Northeastern horizons—but in their company she felt more powerful, more deeply appreciated, more positively enjoyed. They had known her at the height of her desirability, in a society that, isolated from urban narcissism and yet partaking of the sex-centered excitement of the times, had valued desirability above all else. Compared with Sukie she had not been promiscuous—rather, lazily loyal to her hopeless husband and her long-term lover, the would-be husbandly Joe Marino. Compared with Jane she had been motherly and conventionally observant of traditional decencies. Yet she somehow reigned over the others, as a broader conduit into the subterranean flow of Nature, that dark countercurrent to patriarchal tyranny which witchcraft drew upon. It was chemistry: without her as catalyst, the dangerous, empowering reaction did not occur.”

Selected Works

Fiction:
The Widows of Eastwick (forthcoming, fall 2008)
Toward the End of Time (1997)
The Afterlife and Other Stories (1994)
Rabbit at Rest (1990)
Bech Is Back (1983)
Problems and Other Stories (1981)
Rabbit is Rich (1981)
Marry Me (1976)
Rabbit Redux (1971)
Bech: A Book (1970)
Couples (1968)
Rabbit, Run (1960)

Poetry:
Americana and Other Poems (2001)
Collected Poems 1953-1993 (1993)
Facing Nature (1985)
Tossing and Turning (1977)
Seventy Poems (1972)
Midpoint and Other Poems (1969)
The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958)

Web Links

Academy of American Achievement biography: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/upd0bio-1

Salon interview: http://www.salon.com/08/features/updike.html

New York Times reviews of and by John Updike: http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/04/06/lifetimes/updike.html

Work for The New York Review of Books: http://www.nybooks.com/authors/158